What a great article. It manages to simultaneously understand and debunk the nostalgia for the old web. I find it a little frustrating to hear people complain about how complicated the web has become and how simple things were back in the day. I mean, sure, there is a lot more complexity in certain areas, but that's because we've become significantly more ambitious and because we've pushed formerly pervasive complexity to the edges (and thus concentrated it to an extent). I'm so glad we don't have to resort to such hacks to get rounded corners.
One could argue that the old-school equivalent of NPM dependency hell was all the little snippets one had to copy and paste to get somewhat portable, somewhat usable sites. Except those dependencies were managed in an entirely ad hoc fashion, without any versioning or attribution.
And as the last section demonstrates, you can now write front end code that is so simple and yet flexible, maintainable and (mostly) portable.
I'll admit, I'm a pretty adamant CSS in JS supporter, but I still do use CSS at the end of the day. This post demonstrates that I still have a lot to learn about proper CSS, but more importantly, there's a gigantic amount that I no longer have to learn. Which is a testament to the progress made.
One could argue that the old-school equivalent of NPM dependency hell was all the little snippets one had to copy and paste to get somewhat portable, somewhat usable sites. Except those dependencies were managed in an entirely ad hoc fashion, without any versioning or attribution.
And as the last section demonstrates, you can now write front end code that is so simple and yet flexible, maintainable and (mostly) portable.
I'll admit, I'm a pretty adamant CSS in JS supporter, but I still do use CSS at the end of the day. This post demonstrates that I still have a lot to learn about proper CSS, but more importantly, there's a gigantic amount that I no longer have to learn. Which is a testament to the progress made.